Posh people move house

Non-stop chatterbox and mystifyingly revered fabricator of sub-Chekovian paddywhackery, Brian Friel has received another production at the Donmar. His play Aristocrats cadges shamelessly from Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. The setting is a crumbling mansion in Donegal occupied by four adult members of the O’Donnell clan (three girls, one boy), who idle around the place waiting for Dad to clock out so they can get their mitts on the bricks.

Lindsey Turner’s production is curiously stripped of ornament. The characters are assembled on a lime-green patio, suggestive of mown grass, which is surmounted by a white frame with the dimensions of the goalposts at Wembley. To represent the mansion and its contents, two props are used: a titchy Edwardian telephone and a little doll’s house containing matchstick chairs and tables which the characters extract and discuss whenever their forebears’ belongings are mentioned in the script. The whole thing feels like a cheap studio version of a show that will be properly mounted once the money arrives. The play’s timescale is also maddeningly vague. From the dialogue I guessed that we were somewhere within a 15-year period between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. But the clues arrived at random. The O’Donnell brother, aged mid-30s, mentioned that he knew Yeats (who died in 1939), and this detail supplied the earlier boundary. Another character mentioned the Greater London Council (dissolved 1986), which set the later limit. I glanced at the programme notes by Professor Terence Dooley, a specialist in ‘Historic Irish Houses and Estates’, but these offered no reliable data because the dimwit professor referred to ‘the Georgian era, 1730-1840’. The four Georges reigned between 1714 and 1830. Inept chronology is only the start of the mystery.